Sunday, April 14, 2013

I have read all the stories in Ron Rash’s previous two major
collections: Chemistry and Other Stories, Picador Paperback Original,
2007; and Burning Bright, HarperCollins, 2010, which won the richly
endowed Frank O’Connor Short Story Prize (35,000 Euro [$45,900] in 2010). He
had his first big success with his novel Serena, which was a New York
Times bestseller; you can get a bitter taste of its titular character in the
story “Pemberton’s Bride” in the collection Chemistry. I think the stories in his new collection, Nothing Gold Can Stay are his best yet.

Rash stands to enjoy even more success with the upcoming film based on
the novel, directed by Susanne Bier and staring Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley
Cooper as newly-married Serena and George Pemberton building a timber empire in
Depression-Era North Carolina. The film is scheduled for release on September
27, 2013.

Rash’s stories has appeared in
the best quarterlies, such as Sewanee Review, South Carolina Review,
Kenyon Review, Shenandoah, and Southern Review, but perhaps not
often read in those low-circulation journals.
He did not make it to The New Yorker until the May 23, 2011
edition with the opening story to Nothing Gold Can Stay, “Trusty.” It is not one of Rash’s best stories, but
with its careful control of the old “biter-bite” story, it is a good
introduction to Rash’s management of the short story form.

I like the stories of Ron Rash,
although, as I have noted in previous essays, I am a bit skeptical when writers
run the risk of exploring or exploiting the people from the Appalachian
Mountains who I grew up with. Rash’s
stories have their complement of hardheaded old hillbillies and meth-headed
young no-accounts. But he does not
condescend to them. He may not always
like them, but he always respects them.
And he always seems to know what is in their hearts.

For example, in the title story
(the title also of a Robert Frost poem you can find online), two young men
break into an old man’s house to steal gold uniform buttons, souvenirs of
war. But even as we are disgusted by
their act, at the end of the story, even as the young man who tells the story
pops the pills they have bought into his mouth, he looks toward the river and
sees a lantern or a campfire. “Out
beyond it, fish move in the current, alive in that other world.”

One of my favorite stories in Nothing
Gold Can Stay, because it embodies the kind of delicate poetry that saves
Rash’s often coarse and ignorant characters from our scorn, is “Something Rich
and Strange”—an extended prose poem about a young girl who gets carried away in
a fast-moving stream and drowns. What
the diver, whose story it is, goes in the water to find her body finds at the
bottom of the stream, he does find something “rich and strange” about the
nature of human vulnerability and the harsh beauty of time.

Another favorite, also an
extended poem, is the concluding story, “Three A.M. and the Stars Were Out,” in
which two old friends, Carson and Darnell, both who have lost their wives and
live alone, deliver a breech calf together.
The story ends with them shaking hands and Carson driving away, thinking,
“Darnell would hang the lantern back on its nail, maybe smoke another cigarette
as he stood at the barn mouth, attentive as any good sentry.”

The trouble with writing about Ron Rash’s stories is that
anything you might say about them is likely to be a spoiler. That can be both a good thing and a bad
thing. On the one hand, Rash’s stories
always seem more than just their plots, so a plot summary would not tell you a
whole lot; on the other hand, a plot summary would indeed “spoil” the pleasure
of following a story’s deceptively simple narrative movement toward an ending
that crystallizes everything.

In her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin
notes Rash’s gift for “hard-hitting surprise endings,” adding that both Alfred
Hitchcock and Rod Serling would have loved “A Sort of Miracle,” the hilarious
story of an accountant named Denton saddled with two worthless brother-in-laws
that his wife won’t let him throw out.
Because of their wallowing around on the couch all day watching medical
shows, Denton has begun to experience what medical folks nowadays call erectile
dysfunction.

Rather than embarrass himself by going to a doctor and
then to a drugstore to get Viagra, Denton goes into the mountains (taking his
no-account brother-in-laws with him) to trap a bear, having read that an old
Chinese medicine to cure ED uses the paws and gall bladder of a bear. The
ending isn‘t pretty, and to laugh at it, which you can’t help doing, might make
you feel a little heartless. I am not going to tell you the ending, for that
would be a spoiler.

“A Servant of History” is about a British academic who
comes to Appalachia in the early 1920s to find and transcribe mountain songs
that have their roots in English ballads.
He knows little or nothing about folks who live in the North Carolina
hills, so when he finds an old woman whose name suggests Scottish origins, he
pompously plays up his own Scottish roots with, as usual in a Rash story,
disastrous results—also funny, but also painful. Again, I am not going to tell
you the ending, which is poetically justice and an emblem of the man’s
ignorance.

In “Twenty-Six Days” the narrator, a janitor at a regional
college, has bought a copy of Chekhov’s stories for his daughter and sits in
his truck reading the story “Misery” about the man who has lost his son and no
one will listen to him but the horse that pulls his coach. Although the janitor says, “You’d think a
story like that would be hokey,” it brings tears to his eyes.

And then there is “The Dowry,” which involves the need to
exact revenge for an old Civil War veteran’s lost hand; the story ends with a
potentially simplistic solution, but which, as usual, Rash manages to bring off
painfully but believably.

In “Cherokee,” a young couple goes to an Indian casino and
tries to turn $157 into a thousand dollars so they can make back payments on a
truck they bought. You expect the worse when they win the thousand and then
must decide whether to go on, but Rash is not that easy.

In “The Magic Bus,” a young woman named Sabra comes to the
aid of a hippie couple whose car boils over while driving by the North Carolina
farm where she seems destined to spend her life. Of course they invite her to come with them, and of course, she
is tempted to do so, but then Rash does the unexpected again

Matthew Gilbert in his review of Nothing Gold Can Stay
in The Boston Globe says that although “violent twists,” “unexpected and
haunting,” mark all the stories, Rash does not present puzzles in his fiction,
not does he play tricks; his stories tend toward “a carefully gauged ambiguity
that can leave a reader retracing events, asking: What really just happened?”
And this, of course, is a characteristic that makes any summary of the
plots of the story spoilers, albeit simplistic spoilers.

I not only like Ron Rash’s short stories, I also like it that he understands the short story as a
form that may begin with a single image or an overheard remark which, with
honest exploration and a keen sense of the language, becomes something
unpredictable and meaningful. Although
Rash’s stories depend on plot, they never seem planned. Rash has said:

I never outline, I never plot. I really don’t know where
it’s going. Maybe I have a vague idea, but I think sometimes there’s a danger
that comes from having an outline, that you’re kind of putting it on rails, not
allowing the story to jump off and go to a place that is surprising to the
reader, and to you as a writer. I go by instinct, and that’s scary. Usually
when I write a novel, I can have worked about a year and it’ll die on me. I
don’t know where it’s going, and it feels hopeless. There can be three, four
months where it just seems dead. I almost always start with an image. I just
see where the image will take me.”

I also like his
respectful understanding of the poetic nature of the form.
In a Daily Beast interview, Rash talked about the difference
between writing poetry, novels and short stories:

“I think writing a poem is like being a greyhound.
Writing a novel is like being a mule. You go up one long row, then down another,
and try not to look up too often to see how far you still have to go. Short
fiction is the medium I love the most, because it requires that I bring
everything I’ve learned about poetry—the concision, the ability to say
something as vividly as possible—but also the ability to create a narrative
that, though lacking a novel’s length, satisfies the reader.”

You might suspect that I am partial to Ron Rash’s stories
because I am an old hillbilly myself who can’t resist stories about a region
and a people I know well.I admit I
enjoy reading fiction about people of the Appalachian Mountains; I have even
written a story or two about those people. I would like to think that my mountain background makes me a demanding reader of
such stories, for I cannot abide outsiders who know little about mountain
people but try to write about them anyway, or, worse, mountain writers who
think they have “got above their raisin” and condescend to their ancestors and
their neighbors. Ron Rash, in my opinion, is neither.

5 comments:

I'm glad to hear the good words. Ron Rash has become one of my favorite writers and I've been really looking forward to this collection. I purchased it recently and now I'll be reading it sooner than later.

I am going to read Ron Rash, based on your review. I saw a movie in 2000 called "Songcatcher" which brings to mind “A Servant of History." It starred Aidan Quinn and Janet McTeer. She played a musicologist who visits her sister in Appalachia and discovers a treasure trove of ancient Scots-Irish ballads, that have been handed down from generation to generation.

I have just bought this collection and am looking forward to it immensely as I really enjoyed 'Burning Bright'. I have read 'Three A.M. and the Stars Were Out' and it is brilliant so I know I am going to enjoy the rest. There are undercurrents to his writing that affect me but I'm not always sure why - I love that because it makes me think about what I've read rather than just receiving the prose passively. I have a similar response when I read Carver. From your review this sounds an excellent collection - thanks for reviewing it.

I like your review although to me "Trusty" was too contrived, as well as too predictable.

The last story was best, even though it reminded me of my own 3:00 a.m. experience, the vet rigging a wench to pry a breached thoroughbred foal out of our best and most beloved mare. My wife and I looking at each other thinking about our loss, both emotionally and financially, something our horse business would not survive.

But I relished the way he made the story greater than the sum of its parts, the nuances letting us know, among other things, that this is out in the country where people know each other's histories and families.

The key lines in that story, to this reader, are Darnell's "There's a wonder to it yet," and "I mean we've gotten a lot more than we ever thought.

Carson says, "The stars don't show out in town like they do here," a commonplace observation by anyone used to living in the country.

But in the context of the story, it means being close to the simple things, being thankful for the eternal rather than the material.

To me, the story answers the title and the subject of all the other stories, by saying that even though golden moments don't stay, we should be grateful a la Marcus Aurelius:

We should live life as if it were a thing borrowed and ought to be prepared to give it back any time--saying here, I thank you for this life I have had in my possession.

Ron Rash has been good, as both novelist and short story writer (not to mention poet), for a long time. And he just keeps getting better. I did not think that this collection could match its predecssor, BURNING BRIGHT (which won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award), but NOTHING GOLD is just as good, maybe even better for its intensity and precision. If you want to sample the collection, try a story called "Cherokee." Then you can go on to read the rest of them.

Tenth Anniversary of My Blog

Friday, Nov. 16, is the tenth anniversary of my blog. I have been taking some time off because I have been working on a new book on the short story. I have submitted a proposal to a publisher and am waiting for a reply. I will let you know when I hear from them. Thank you for continuing to read essays in my archives.

Now Available from Amazon in paperback and Kindle

Click cover to go to Amazon and read the Introduction and first chapter.

Dubliners Centenial

One hundred years ago, the great collection of stories Dubliners by James Joyce appeared. If you are interested in my comments on that collection, see my posts in April 2012 when the book was featured in Dublin's "One City, One Book."